I am the president of Metis Strategy, a CIO advisory firm that I founded in 2001. I have advised many of the best chief information officers at multi-billion dollar corporations in the United States and abroad. I've written for the Wall Street Journal, CIO Magazine, CIO Insight, Information Week and several other periodicals. I am also the author of Implementing World Class IT Strategy: How IT Can Drive Organizational Innovation (Wiley Press, September 2014) and of World Class IT: Why Businesses Succeed When IT Triumphs (Wiley Press, December 2009), a book on leading IT practices that has sold over 12,000 copies around the world. Since 2008, I have moderated a widely listened to podcast entitled “The Forum on World Class IT,” which features a wide array of IT thought-leaders, and is available at www.forumonworldclassit.com on a biweekly basis. I have been the keynote speaker at a host of corporate conferences and universities in the US, Canada, Mexico, the United Kingdom, the Republic of Ireland, Spain, China, India, Australia, and Saudi Arabia. You can reach me at peter.high [at] metisstrategy.com or on Twitter @WorldClassIT

Brian Bonner, Texas Instruments' Board-Level CIO

Brian Bonner is the CIO of Texas Instruments, a $13 billion dollar semi-conductor company, and he manages a central IT organization that supports all aspects of IT including manufacturing, sales, and product development throughout the world. His organization is 1,100 people strong. Although Bonner has engineering degrees at the undergraduate and graduate levels, he spent time in a wide array of functions outside of IT, such as his role as vice president of Worldwide Mass Marketing and Acquisition Integration at Texas Instruments. He has also held general management, sales, and product development roles and was responsible for product strategy & development as well as revenue generation. His vast experience across nearly 20 years at Texas Instruments has made him a particularly business savvy IT executive, and it has meant that he has not been patient with any perception of IT as a support organization.

His business savvy has also made him an attractive candidate to sit on boards of different kinds. Currently, he is a board member of Copper Mobile and he is an advisory board member to for Gemini Israel Ventures. Bonner says that board membership has made him a much stronger executive at Texas Instruments, and recommends that others who might seek a board position first work on demonstrating business value in their current roles as CIO, demonstrating that they have the know-how necessary to become a board-level CIO.

(To listen to an unabridged podcast version of this conversation, please click this link. This is the fourth article in Board Level CIO series. To read the other articles in the series, including an interviews with the CIOs of FedEx and Lincoln Trust, please click this link. To read future articles in the series, including interviews with the CIOs of Intel and Cardinal Health, please click the “Follow” link above.)

Peter High: Brian, you have a rather non-traditional path to the CIO role. Can you talk a bit about your own personal history and what led you to the current position several years ago?

Brian Bonner: That’s right, Peter. I think the key ingredient for anybody working in technology is to have a curious mind, and I have always been interested in learning new things. I started out with a masters in electrical engineering and actually worked as an automotive engineer before coming to TI. At TI, I went into technical sales where I sold technology to customers and then progressed to sales manager. From there I had an opportunity to become an engineering manager in one of our major sites. I then advanced to running a couple of profit and loss centers and for several years I became a global business manager responsible for a collection of businesses that were around a couple hundred million dollars in size.

Then I was asked to build our mass marketing capabilities. This was really an exciting opportunity to take some of the things I had learned in sales and business and put together the infrastructure to take care of our customers worldwide. Just as I was really starting to enjoy that, I got the opportunity to do two acquisition integrations, one in New Hampshire, and one near Chicago. I was asked to be the interim leader of those companies as we folded them into Texas Instruments. As that was winding down, I was asked to take over the role as CIO for TI, which was something I didn’t feel I was at all prepared for and never had on my career path. But after talking with our CEO, I realized that all the things I had done prior to this role had prepared me very well for the role of CIO, while also preparing me to run it like a business function. So I think the path that I took to get here came from some of my curiosity about technology and how business operates.

High: If you think about the stereotypes of the IT department you know historically it has been a support organization; an order-taking organization of sorts, rather than a strategic organization. You just walked us through a series of past responsibilities that were very much customer-facing. You also mentioned the fact that you had profit and loss responsibilities. These are not the traditional facets or descriptions one would attribute to the IT department. As you contemplated the move to become CIO, obviously a very senior level of the organization, how did you feel about stepping away from that customer-facing aspect and the P&L responsibilities?

Bonner: As I looked more into the role, I realized how important those backgrounds were for success, and saw that there was a huge opportunity to continue using the skills I had developed. We have done a lot of partnerships with customers (both our supplier base and our internal customers) over the years where a business process ends up grounded in some innovative technology. So the things that I learned as business manager and as a sales leader were very much spot on for looking at how you collaborate with others, how you look at solving a complex problem, and how you drive ownership across the organization.

High: As you mentioned, it was an opportunity for you to develop a team that thought of IT as a business function within the organization. Was there a cultural change necessary with the team that you found yourself leading so that IT would think more like another one of the business functions that you had already led?

Bonner: Very much so. I think IT at the time was transitioning from back office activity to the forefront for helping business enablement. One of the paths I took very early on with my team was that everybody in the organization, whether IT or elsewhere in the company, needs to understand how we get paid. From there, I explained to the organization that we don’t sell IT. IT is a tool that enables us to be a world class semi-conductor company and support our customers worldwide with their ability to find products, buy products and have products shipped to them on time, supported with all the other activity that goes with a full product portfolio.

Having said that, there were folks that still saw themselves as a gate keeper and some of their criteria were backwards in terms of how they were approaching the business. They were telling our colleagues what they were going to get versus listening to what they needed and partnering with them to figure out how we could best do that in a safe, secure, and scalable way. So we had to renew the IT culture. But it was actually kind of infectious as people came to realize “We are getting invited to meetings. We are learning about business. We are working on things that people at the top level in the company are talking about.” Very quickly people began to understand the value of what IT could bring and how that slight change in behavior could have so much impact on the success of the company.

High: In your past roles, you gained an appreciation of what made the company successful. I wonder now that you are CIO, are you still involved in sales to any degree? Obviously the people on the other side of the table in those equations are often very tech savvy themselves. I wonder what aspects of your role as CIO have given you a different appreciation either of sales calls or customer contacts of various kinds.

Brian Bonner, CIO of Texas Instruments

Bonner: I typically don’t get involved in sales calls. It is usually after the sale that I get involved in collaborating either in the engineering stage or in the product planning stage. The account manager is still the one responsible for managing the customer; our business leaders have a number of things they care about in terms of the commercial agreements. And from a process standpoint, IT can help put together a plan that helps automate and provide scalable ways for us to figure the existing business. If we do this well it makes it easier for the customer to give us more business.

High: Another really interesting aspect of your career path is your membership on a number of boards of organizations. You are currently on the boards of Copper Mobile and Gemini Israel Ventures. As you think about your experience on each of those, what aspects of your role as CIO has been a particular advantage to you as well as to those companies, and to what extent can you draw comparisons or provide insights to CIOs who would wish to follow in your footsteps?

Bonner: I think the advantage that a CIO brings is really their understanding of the breadth of business processes and the connectedness of those processes. I think some of the other functional experts that participate on boards have very deep knowledge in a particular discipline, but they sometimes don’t connect the dots to see how the various pieces work together, or should work together, for a company that is trying to build a robust capability. That is one of the bigger areas that being a CIO has benefited me.

The other thing frankly, is the role of the board member. We are there to help set strategy, review business performance and look out for the interest of the shareholders. I think as a CIO you really develop the skills to ask those types of questions, because there are usually several levels of depth behind everything we work on. So I believe the preparation for being a good CIO also prepares you for being a good board member.

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